Alter-Tales of Multispecies Water Relations Through Sensational Merri Merri and Stony Creek Water Stories

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

Reducing water waste is a national priority in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth. As freshwater is limited, rethinking humans’ relations with water is necessary for refiguring children’s water futures and the survival of humans and more-than-humans. This poster sets out to tackle this enormous challenge, but in small, practical, and non-heroic ways. At two childcare centres located in Australia, we have been rethinking ‘reduce’ and water waste by creating with water. Although creating with water included a wide range of practices, this poster presentation shows how sensational moments were used as provocations to notice multispecies stories that water relations can tell. In order to focus on children’ lives and the ways in which they are already entangled with water, we focus on two nearby waterways (Merri Merri and Stony Creek) that children and teachers have been visiting regularly. We pay attention to Merri Merri and Stony Creek water stories to understand, appreciate, and respect multispecies water relations. As a result, alter-tales of multispecies water relations becomes possible.

Feminist environmental humanities (Neimanis, 2012; Plumwood, 1993; Rose, 2012) and new materialist conceptualizations of waste (Hird, 2012) informed these water inquiries. Four ideas guided the inquiry: (1) water is not static, (2) it’s not just humans that make things happen, (3) humans and water exist in entangled relations and affect each other, and (4) entangled human/water relations have ethical implications. Children, educators and researchers thought with these ideas while walking, talking, and sensing water stories that Merri Merri and Stony Creek could tell.

The modes of inquiry were embodied, experiential, and sensational. Visual and sensorial ethnographic methods (Pink, 2009; 2013) were used to engage with multispecies water relations. Post-qualitative and creative methods, such as sound recordings, inefficient mappings, walking-talking-noting, and sensational printing were used to generate Merri Merri and Stony Creek water relation stories. The data sources include digital images of artistic work, researcher and educator journal entries, informal group conversations with children, water books, water stories, field notes, sound recordings, and art ‘doings’.

Findings show that alter-tales, that do not rely on human exceptionalism, become possible when children and adults learn how to think with water and the stories that water tells. Water stories play a significant role in refiguring children’s relations with water because they support children’s multispecies imaginations and ways of thinking. This in turn allows them to see, understand, and sense the agency of land, water, and all forms of life. Because children do not separate out the multispecies relations, they are already attuned to the entangled lives of the world.

Authors

• Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University

• Catherine Hamm, La Trobe University